Volitans Software Announces Holiday Hard Drive Giveaway

[prMac.com] Lancaster, Pennsylvania - Volitans Software today announces a Holiday Hard Drive Giveaway. In the spirit of the holidays, Volitans Software is giving away one free hard drive to a lucky winner. The winner will have the choice between a 1.5TB desktop hard drive or a 500GB laptop hard drive. To enter, fill out the form on the giveaway entry website.

Winner chooses between new Momentus 5400.6 SATA 500-GB Hard Drive (model ST9500325AS) or Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 1.5TB Hard Drive (model ST31500341AS), or equivalently priced drive if model is unavailable. The prize will be shipped free of charge to the winner. The giveaway runs from December 9th, 2008 to December 24th, 2008. The winner is randomly picked December 25th.

Full Rules and Fine Print:
* No purchase necessary to win, but try a copy of SMART Utility while you are here. It's a great way to check out your current hard drive. Note that purchasing SMART Utility does not increase your chances of winning.

* Entry period runs from 12:01 am EST on December 9th, 2008 until 11:59 pm EST December 24th, 2008.

* Winner will be selected at random on December 25th, 2008 from the email entries and notified by email. Winner will be posted on the website on or after January 15th, 2009.

* Winner must respond within 7 days of being selected or a new winner will be chosen. Volitans Software will not be responsible for email delivery failures, including but not limited to power outages, server crashes, filtering technologies, or incorrect email addresses.

* Only one entry per person, as multiple entries will be discarding. Entries will be monitored for cheating, and entrants may be disqualified if such cheating is discovered.

* Giveaway is open to individuals who are legal residents of the United States and 18 years of age or older. Individuals must also be legally allowed to participate in giveaways. Giveaway void where prohibited by law. While we appreciate all our customers in all states as well as in all countries across the world, laws very greatly and we cannot satisfy all legal requirements everywhere.

* By participating in the giveaway, entrant agrees to not sue Volitans Software and not hold Volitans Software liable for mistakes or other violations.

About SMART Utility:
SMART Utility is an application to scan the internal hardware diagnostics system of hard drives SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is a system built into hard drives by their manufacturers to report on various measurements (called attributes) of a hard drive's operation. The attributes can be used to detect when a hard drive is having mechanical or electrical problems, and can indicate when the hard drive is failing. SMART Utility can read and display these attributes. This allows time to hopefully backup, and then replace the drive.

SMART Utility is different from other drive utilities, such as Disk Utility, which only read the overall SMART Status. SMART Utility not only displays the individual attributes to see their status and information, but it also uses an internal algorithm based on those attributes to detect drives failing before SMART indicates it has failed. This pre-fail detection can save precious data before SMART has determined that the drive has failed. And, while the raw information can be viewed on the command line with smartmontools (which is what SMART Utility is based on), SMART Utility presents it in an easy to read format, as well as running its internal pre-fail algorithm.

Features:
* Displays all supported drives and their partitions
* Displays easy to read overall SMART status with color coded text
* Displays important information in the main window, such as drive model, capacity, power on hours, temperature, bad sector counts, and error counts and types
* Displays more detailed information in separate windows, including capabilities, all available attributes, and the past five errors
* Supports scanning individual RAID drives in addition to non-RAIDed drives
* Supports logging all information to a log file for verifying SMART data
* Supports Mac OS X 10.4 or later (including Server) and both PowerPC and Intel Macs

Pricing and Availability:
SMART Utility is available in a variety of licenses: a personal license for $25 (USD), a family license for $40, an educational license for $65 and a business license for $100. It can be purchased online or in an innovative way: within SMART Utility itself through its embedded web store.

Volitans Software was founded on February 22, 2007, by Matthew Butch, to sell SMART Utility. The name Volitans comes from the scientific name of the Red Lionfish. Matthew is an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician, an Apple Certified Technical Coordinator, and an Apple Certified System Administrator. He conceived of the idea of SMART Utility because he wanted a better way to test hard drives in his job as an on-site Macintosh Technician.